


The Great Frog Heist

by Oldguybones



Category: IT - Stephen King
Genre: Don't Take This Too Seriously, Fluff, M/M, Reddie as lab partners, Silly, Which then turns into partners in crime, frognapping, really - Freeform, that crime?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-09
Updated: 2019-09-09
Packaged: 2020-10-13 04:36:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20576573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Oldguybones/pseuds/Oldguybones
Summary: Richie's excited to have long time crush, Eddie, as his lab partner. But Eddie's got some other plans, none of which include dissecting the dead frog on the table in front of them. As the two of them face detention, will they take it a step further and risk being put away for good to pull off the greatest heist Derry high school had ever seen?





	The Great Frog Heist

Richie picked up the smooth, metal scalpel and poked the dull end of it against the specimen sitting on the tray in front of him. It was a frog, a dead one obviously. Gruesome would be an understated way of describing its state, belly up with its arms and legs stretched out. And it would only get worse from here on out, especially considering the fact that he was flying solo for this dissection mission. 

“Same, buddy, same,” he muttered sympathetically, feeling much like the dead amphibian laying before him. Cold, dead, and prepared to be fucked with. Okay, maybe that was going too far, but something about the sight of it laying motionless before him felt relatable. Exhaustion had been weighing on his limbs all day, as well as his mind. He had no patience to deal with any further shit and he really just wanted to go home. 

But alas, here he was. In third period. Barely approaching lunch. He still had a ways to go and plenty of disinterest to go around. On top of that, he now had to dissect this frog, the thought of which was absolutely repulsive. And  _ alone _ , nonetheless. Everyone else was partnered off, in a way that felt painfully metaphorical for his life and with prom looming around the corner, it deepened the hole searing into his chest. 

The painful, dreadful loneliness that he couldn’t seem to shake, even surrounded by a sea of people, even amongst a gaggle of friends. He ached for intimacy, for a real human connection. He shook his head in a last ditch effort to banish these thoughts because it was third period biology, not the middle of the night where feelings like that were common, where he laid awake in bed, unable to sleep due to all insecurities weighing him down. Surely, he could save them all for later tonight, when the timing felt much more appropriate.

For now, maybe he could pretend to be happy. At least he hadn’t been met with the same fate as Frogilicious, the name he had given his specimen. Did naming it make it harder to cut it open? He was about to find out, scalpel in hand, when the classroom door swung open, smacking against the wall with a disruptive thud. 

“Mr. Kaspbrak, nice of you to join us,” the teacher called from her podium, clearly not pleased by the student’s late arrival. Eddie Kaspbrak wasn’t typically the late-for-class kind of guy, let alone the noisy arrival kind. For the majority of his high school career, he followed all the rules, those imposed by both the school and his mother. The latter seemed to be much stricter than the former, at least from what Richie had heard around school. He didn’t really know Eddie beyond a couple shared classes here and a few interactions in the halls there. Everything he knew about him he gathered from rumors and the most recent ones, combined with his dashing good looks, made Richie harbor quite the crush.

And now, seeing as every other person in class was already paired off, Eddie would have no other choice but to work with him. It felt like a dream come true for Richie, who never tried to pursue any kind of relationship with Eddie. Okay, that sounded mighty presumptuous to say, as if the only reason was the fact that Richie had never asked before. But that was precisely why he never had; he didn’t bother because he figured there was no point. He didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell with someone like Eddie Kaspbrak. 

This point seemed to be solidified when he eagerly waved Eddie over to his station after he glanced around the room for an empty seat.  _ Play it cool, Tozier.  _ Even though he told himself this, he doubted that he had any clue how to execute that play. He had two settings: total apathy and whatever the fuck that just was, nothing in between.

His heart did a little flip, however, when Eddie offered him a warm smile as he sat on the stool beside Richie’s. Maybe he could do this; maybe he could in fact “play it cool,” as he had begged himself to do. There wasn’t anything special about Eddie. He was just an ordinary student, right? 

Except for his perfectly wavy, blonde hair and his multicolored brownish eyes that look green in the right light, sometimes hazel but always with little flecks of gold around the iris. He had a fashion style that Richie could never quite pin down; he’d seen him in shorts and a polo before, other times in jeans and a graphic tee, or instances like today where he was clad in a pair of denim overalls and a flannel shirt that appeared to be a couple sizes too big (probably stolen from his bestie Bill Denbrough, whose style consisted of nothing but flannels).

“Alright, now that everyone is here and has a partner, we can begin the dissection process…”

“Actually, Mrs. Jenkins, no,” Eddie called from across the classroom, his arms crossed over his chest. He may have been on the shorter side, but he stood tall in his defiance. “I’m not going to do that. I refuse to mutilate the corpse of a defenseless animal who did nothing to deserve this. And frankly, it's fucking disgusting."

Great, he was alone again. 

"Richie agrees with me!"

_ He knows my name! _ Wait...what did he just say? 

“Is that true, Mr. Tozier?” 

Way to drag him into this; he didn't ask to be a part of this. He just wanted to do his part and move on with his day. But then he realized this was a nut up or shut up situation, one that could gain the attention of his longtime crush. So by God, he was going to nut the fuck up. 

“One hundred percent!” he exclaimed, in a way he hoped conveyed confidence. It felt like he came up a little short, but oh well, it probably did the trick well enough. He didn’t miss the way Eddie caught his eye with a triumphant grin, bright and shining, capturing his heart without a moment’s notice. 

“So neither of you will be dissecting your specimen today?” she asked, her voice and demeanor mirroring the enthusiasm of a DMV worker. Actually, Richie had gone a few months ago to take his driver’s test and the clerk had been cheerier than this.

Richie shared another look with Eddie and nodded firmly. “No ma’am, we will not!”

Richie wasn’t sure what was going to happen next. Both in regards to their irate teacher and the cute boy standing beside him. Would they get kicked out of class? Would Eddie admire his tenacity and ask him out? Richie’s heart beat rapidly in his chest from the range of possibilities. In those few quiet moments, where all that could be heard was the chatter amongst their classmates, they stood painfully still and waited for the ball to drop. 

“Detention, for the both of you, after school.”

Richie’s breath hitched in his throat at those words; not because he was scared to face his consequences but rather he wasn’t sure how Eddie would take such news and some small part of Richie wanted nothing bad to happen to Eddie ever. Not that Eddie gave off an air of needing protection, at least not anymore. 

But to Richie’s slight surprise, Eddie shrugged his shoulders casually and bent down to pick up his backpack from beside their stools, slinging it over his shoulder. He reached back and held his hand out to Richie, who stared at it dumbfounded for a moment. Once Richie finally summoned the courage to take it, Eddie began pulling him away, as he scrambled to grab his own backpack. 

“Where do you think you’re going?” their teacher snapped.

“We already have detention so why would we bother staying for the rest of class?” Eddie asked quickly as he continued to pull Richie through the classroom and towards the door. 

Richie thought that maybe Mrs. Jenkins yelled something else after them as they fled, but he was too wrapped up in the sensation of Eddie’s warm, soft hand gripping his own. He wasn’t sure where Eddie was leading him but he found himself willing to go nonetheless. 

Once they were halfway down the hallway, Eddie threw a smile over his shoulder. “C’mon,” he said in a tone that made Richie feel like he was being included in a secret, and maybe he was. “I know where they keep the live frogs.”

"Okay, well, I didn't even want to cut up a dead one," Richie replied with a brief look of disgust on his face. 

Eddie rolled his eyes and let out a sarcastic  _ ha, ha _ all while still dragging Richie along. "No, genius, we're gonna rescue them all."

Richie's face lit up, even though it wasn't a sincere laugh. "How are we gonna do that? Where are we gonna put them?" His curiosity piqued and his adrenaline followed suit. He’d disrespected plenty of teachers and disrupted many classes in his day, but even he hadn’t pulled off a heist like this before. So when he heard Eddie's response, he felt he had a right to be skeptical of the whole endeavor.

"I don't know, we'll figure it out," he answered dismissively as they came upon another classroom, one with it's door shut and lights off. Eddie peeked in the little side window and nodded in a curt, yet satisfied way. "All I know is that they're in here and they deserve to be in the wild! They don't deserve to have their lives decided for them! Especially when that means they get poisoned and then mutilated by some shithead teenagers who probably won’t even wash their hands before or after-"

"Okay, okay," Richie cut in quickly, giving his hand a squeeze, both for comfort and reassurance (seeing as those two things went hand in hand, _pun intended). _Something about the tone of Eddie's words spoke to some truth, some relevance he found to his own life. Richie could see it in the way his soft brown eyes seemed to ignite with flecks of gold as if lit by passion itself. "We shall find a way!" he declared, his voice taking on the smallest hint of an accent, one that Richie didn’t even recognize but he barreled right past it because it didn’t really matter. All that mattered in that moment was freeing a few frogs from a tragic fate and saving a cute boy from the heartache that followed.

Like many things he’d faced in his life, Richie seemed to underestimate the number of frogs that would be involved. When Eddie said they would be rescuing  _ some _ frogs, his mind bounced around small numbers; the worst case scenario he came upon had just  _ barely  _ crossed into double digits. But the reality of it all?  _ Dozens.  _ They were going to rescue dozens of frogs and Richie would be damned if he didn’t participate in this daring event. 

“Okay, so there’s a window right there,” Richie announced, gesturing to the window which was already cracked open. “We’ll just take them one by one and pop them out the window and those little bastards can hop their way to safety.”

Richie thought it was a foolproof plan until Eddie shot him an incredulous stare, paired with a sassy, “Richie, we’re on the second floor.”

“So?” he waved dismissively, “That’s why they have those legs, right?”

Eddie held his gaze for a silent moment, where he almost appeared to be mulling the answer over in his mind before finally shaking his head, “No! We’re not dropping them out the window! Just help me find something to take them outside!”

“Hold that thought!” Richie exclaimed, booking it out of the room and returning a few minutes later with the janitor’s cart. “Your chariot has arrived!”

“You’re a genius,” Eddie professed, running over to grab the cart and wheel it over to the first tank of frogs. “Help me move this,” he instructed gently, already taking hold of one side of the tank, then loading it onto the cart with Richie’s help. 

With a little finagling, they managed to fit all three tanks on the cart. In that moment, when he could hear all the ribbeting from the frogs basically stacked on top of each other crammed into these small tanks, Richie was completely bought into the mission, not just because Eddie’s cute but because he was  _ right _ . They absolutely had to save these creatures. 

“Let’s do this!”

The journey outside proved to be more difficult than either of them anticipated. It made them both realize how inaccessible their school was. Perhaps that would be their next mission; they made a helluva pair after all. But for now, they focused on carefully carrying the cart down the few steps outside. Once or twice, they almost lost it, but managed to regain their composure just in time and soon enough they were making a quick (but safe) getaway with the frogs, toward their brand new lives, to their second chances. Maybe that was a heavy analogy for frogs, but Richie felt it. And looking at Eddie, Richie could tell that he felt it, too.

Beyond the baseball field across the street from the high school and before the elementary school a few blocks over, there was a wetland area, a marshy area they had wandered through many times. Back when they were all kids, the elementary school would take them for field trips to identify plants and trees. It’d been years since he’d gone further than the outskirts to share a smoke with Bev. 

The frogs would be happy there, Eddie had told him on their journey. Richie made a joke about them finding old cigarette butts to smoke, but it was not well received and Richie had to spend the next few minutes assuring Eddie that he would  _ never  _ drop a cigarette butt like that. He was a responsible smoker. Eddie insisted that was an oxymoron. 

Finally, after a fair amount of struggle and a certain amount of disbelief that they hadn’t been caught, they made it to the wetlands and unloaded the tanks from the cart.

“You do the honors,” Richie insisted, his lips curving into a smile forged from both excitement and fondness.

Eddie looked up at him with a similar look and then crouched down to push all the lids off of the tanks. They both waited with bated breath for any sense of movement, for the first frog to make its triumphant escape. But as it turned out, they were just as unmotivated as Richie felt on weekends, when he didn’t have to go anywhere or do anything, frequently spending hours in the same exact spot. Not exactly the kind of response either of them were expecting.

“C’mon little buddies,” Eddie said, tilting the tank back and forth in the gentlest of motions. He even tried tapping his finger against the side of the glass, hoping maybe it would startle some movement out of them. “You’re free now.”

Still nothing.

Richie sighed playfully, “Alright, pack them back up and let's take them back inside. I guess they don’t want to be rescued today!”

Eddie stood and turned to face Richie, his hand resting on his hip while the other one wagged a finger in Richie’s face. “You know, that’s not fucking funny! We just put all this work into getting them out here and I will take them all out by hand if I have to.”

Richie’s attention had turned away, a look of wonderment lighting up his face. “I don’t think you’ll have to, Eds,” he said, slightly breathless from the beautiful sight of dozens of frogs hopping across the green grass towards the woods.

Eddie let out a surprised gasp as he watched the scene as well, his hands coming up to rest over his mouth. “Oh wow,” he whispered.

“Yeah, wow,” Richie echoed, his voice identical to Eddie’s amazed whisper, though the inflection spoke a thousand variations as Richie’s gaze was now caught solely and unwaveringly on Eddie. His chest felt warm from the fondness washing over him. He had never seen another human being look so captivated by something before; it was an endearing sight to witness and if dozens of frogs made it to safety too, well then that was just the icing on top of the cake. 

Richie’s cheeks turned red when Eddie looked over at him and caught him staring. He began to stammer through a half-assed excuse, but Eddie didn’t seem to care at all. Instead, he closed the gap between them and stood on his tiptoes, pressing a chaste kiss to Richie’s cheek.

“Thanks for helping me Richie,” he said sincerely, his lips curling up in a smile. He placed his hand on Richie’s forearm and gestured towards the now empty tanks. “We have one more mission to complete before we’re in the clear. Getting all this stuff back inside.”

This elicited a light chuckle from Richie as he moved to help Eddie load the tanks back up on the cart, “You know we’re as good as busted, right? We’re the prime suspects.”

“Well then call me Bonnie,” Eddie replied cheekily, throwing Richie a playful look over his shoulder as he began pushing the cart through the grass. “You coming, Clyde?” 

Richie jogged to catch up to Eddie, hands in his pockets as he walked alongside the cart. He couldn’t help the grin etched on his face, stretching ear to ear. They were like a modern day Bonnie and Clyde, just with much less murder and robbery and presumably more frogs (history couldn’t be 100% sure of their involvement with frogs). Richie knew, as Eddie chattered excitedly about how the frogs could now live the rest of their lives in peace, that he would risk a thousand afternoons of detention to go on another heist with Eddie, and maybe even a date someday too. 


End file.
